What is online reputation management?

Online reputation management is about bridging the gap between how the public perceives your brand VS. how you see your brand. If you're lucky, the gap between these 2 different perceptions isn't very big, but that often isn't the case...

What is media monitoring?

Media monitoring (aka. social listening or social media monitoring) is the process of monitoring various forms of media (social media, discussion forums, review sites, news sites, blogs, podcasts, etc...) for mentions of specific keywords or phrases.

Monitoring mentions of your brand is a key aspect of reputation management.

It reveals how strong your brand reputation is, and what people like and dislike most about it. This shows you what you can do to improve and manage your reputation... it is also a critical tool in protecting your brand from a major PR crisis.

Learn more about media monitoring and online reputation management, and pick up some tips and essential monitoring skills in this course.

After each lesson, you'll find a short media monitoring activity under Resources. Complete each activity to help process and reinforce everything you've learned in each lesson.

In order to protect and manage your online reputation, you need to be aware of the kind of reputation your brand has in the first place. This starts with monitoring mentions of your brand - to find out what people have to say about it. (Warning: this can be a real eye opener, as the Internet is generally not a place where people sugarcoat their comments.)

In this video, you'll learn what kind of keywords will help you retrieve the most feedback about your brand so you can view your strengths and weaknesses through the eyes of the public.

Whenever people talk about your brand, they are actively shaping your reputation. That's why you need to look at audience representation.

Monitoring mentions of your brand shows you who talks about it and the kind of audience that you're reaching. If this is not your target audience, you may need to adjust your strategy. If it is your target audience, you can learn more about what they're looking for through the way they talk about your brand and whether your product or service meets their needs - so you can find out how to serve them better.

Sentiment analysis is a process that shows you whether your brand elicits positive or negative feelings from your audience. In a nutshell, sentiment is the backbone metric of online reputation management.

By examining the sentiment of your brand mentions, and monitoring the amount of positive vs. negative mentions about your brand over time, you can measure the strength of your reputation through data.

If your brand is gaining more positive sentiment over time, you know you're building a solid reputation. If you observe an increase in negative sentiment (or, even worse, a sudden increase in negative mentions), this means you need to take a closer look at the context of these mentions and do some damage control.

Monitoring brand sentiment is critical to protecting your reputation, especially in terms of preventing a major PR crisis.

Filtering mentions of your brand helps you focus on specific pieces of information.

In terms of monitoring your brand sentiment, you may want to look at general mentions of your brand. This will help you get an overall sense of how your brand makes people feel.

You can also choose to look at mentions about specific aspects of your brand: your customer service, a particular feature of your product, or if you have more than one product - a particular product.

This video shows you how to use Boolean search filters and keyword qualifiers to narrow down specific pieces of information in your brand mentions, to help you navigate through both the general and specific aspects of your online reputation.

The first critical step in reputation management is to establish a point of reference or benchmark. This applies to both your brand sentiment and your typical number of mentions.

The reason why is because when you understand what is typical for your brand, this makes it easier to spot potential problem areas - so you can prevent them from turning into full-fledged PR disasters.

This video shows you how to establish a point of reference for your brand, by monitoring your typical number of mentions and your typical levels of positive and negative sentiment.

Looking at the context of your mentions shows you what people associate with your brand. This is very helpful when you're trying to understand 'why'. Why is there so much negative sentiment all of a sudden? Why do I see a sharp increase in positive sentiment? Why does this topic keep coming up in mentions of my brand?

Context provides clarity, and even though it takes a little more effort to grasp than by just glancing at the numbers, this is where your mentions are worth their weight in gold.

This video shows you how to find context in your mentions: through a quick shortcut (via the Word Cloud - with a caveat) and by digging deeper into your mentions.

The benefits of monitoring brand mentions for your competitors are many-fold:

1. It allows you to compare the strength of your reputation with that of competing brands.

2. It shows you your competitors' strengths and weaknesses.

3. It identifies channels where your competitors are most (and least) active.

4. It provides you with insight into what you can do to improve and capture more of the market share.

5. It helps you conduct market research.

In short, monitoring your competitors is another way to learn how your own brand is doing.

This video shows you how to conduct a simple competitor analysis.